The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

biologists talk about “background extinction.” In ordinary times—times here understood to mean whole geol ...

The Big Five extinctions, as seen in the marine fossil record, resulted in a sharp decline in diversity a ...

extinctions. Pretty much every herpetologist working out in the field has watched several. (Even I, in the ...

frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.) Suggesti ...

carrying. At the very last cluster of houses, in the tiny village of Los Ángeles, the men materialized out ...

slipping, and violating Rule No. 1 of rainforest safety: never grab onto something if you don’t know wha ...

the frogs with our splashing. He waded ahead, and we stayed for a long time up to our knees in water, try ...

CHAPTER II THE MASTODON’S MOLARS Mammut americanum Extinction may be the first scientific idea that ki ...

Systema Naturae, there is really only one kind of animal—those that exist. This view persisted despi ...

Frenchmen, most of the others Algonquians and Iroquois. The journey was arduous and supplies were short. On one ...

with thin ridges that run from side to side, so that the chewing surface resembles the sole of a ...

on the State of Virginia, written just after he left the state’s governorship, Jefferson concocted his own ve ...

revolutionary calendar in use at the time, 15 Germinal Year IV—he presented the results of his resea ...

(possibly) one to two. He was just getting going. A few months earlier, Cuvier had received sketches of a ...

some wallabies were sunning themselves on the grass. Across the gardens, there’s a large hall ...

“This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology,” Tassy said, pointing to the largest of the group. “The beginnin ...

lot tougher, and it allowed mammoths—and still allows elephants—to consume an unusually abrasive diet. ...

* WITH his lecture on “the species of elephants, both living and fossil,” Cuvier had succeed ...

(Even today, little is known about these species, except that they were ungulates and lived some ...

predicted, shaped like a salamander’s. The creature was not an antediluvian human but something ...